Todd Lerew is curious. He likes lists. And he doesn’t like doing issues midway.
Because of this he collects pictorial maps, why he has visited 248 public libraries in Los Angeles County and 401 of the 483 municipalities in California. It’s why he just lately joined the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Elks, Moose Worldwide, Oddfellows and about 50 different golf equipment — so many who he needed to get a separate pockets for membership playing cards.
This will seem to be quite a lot of tasks for one 37-year-old, who calls them “acts of compulsive nerdiness.” However these pursuits pale subsequent to Lerew’s ardour for unsung museums and collections.
That’s the topic of his new guide, “Additionally on View: Distinctive and Surprising Museums of Larger Los Angeles,” printed this week by Angel Metropolis Press at Los Angeles Public Library.
The quantity, an illustrated exploration of 64 museums whose names you might be unlikely to know, attracts on a decade of analysis and stands as a problem to all Angelenos who assume they’ve a deal with on the native cultural panorama.
Skid Row Historical past Museum & Archive, from prime; Skateboarding Corridor of Fame Skateboard Museum in Simi Valley; and Finnish Folks Artwork Museum in Pasadena. (Ryan Schude)
These are ventures — usually one-person crusades — that remember quick meals, Finnish people artwork, Skid Row, skateboarding, vertebrate zoology and extra. Sure, the Museum of Jurassic Expertise in Culver Metropolis is right here. Sure, the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum in Port Hueneme and the Cucamonga Service Station Museum too.
The Museum of the Republic of Vietnam in Westminster? The Parsonage of Aimee Semple McPherson in Echo Park? The Historic Glass Museum in Redlands? Lerew and photographer Ryan Schude visited all of them.
“There’s nothing you’ll be able to say about museums that’s true of all of them,” Lerew stated one latest morning. “And you’ll find them in all places you look.”
Certainly, he spoke close to the Lengthy Seashore waterfront, surrounded by unremarkable skyscrapers and nil foot visitors. However a block away stands the Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum, opened in 1927.
This was first of two stops the place Lerew deliberate to ship copies of the brand new guide to people who find themselves in it.
The oldest working tattoo store within the U.S.
Clockwise from prime left, at Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum in Lengthy Seashore: veteran tattoo artist Kari Barba, tattoo designs on show, a jacket from Bert Grimm’s Well-known Tattoo Studio and a show case of flash and instruments. (Ryan Schude)
Inside Outer Limits, founder and tattoo artist Kari Barba, 64, eagerly unwrapped a replica of the guide. Barba, a celebrated tattoo artist and trade pioneer who runs a second tattoo location in Costa Mesa, stated she purchased the Lengthy Seashore house 20 years in the past as a result of “I used to be actually harm by the concept that the historical past of the constructing could be misplaced.”
Barba led Lerew and a customer by the restored rooms; the tables and trendy instruments now in use; the vintage instruments; the stencils of anchors, hearts and dragons; the outdated pictures of inked sailors on the long-gone Pike amusement park; a hand-painted window that staff discovered hidden in a wall; and, in a single nook, a mysterious lined vat.
“You’ve acquired to see the vaseline earlier than we go,” Lerew stated.
So Barba and Lerew stepped to the vat and uncovered it, revealing a glutinous stew of rags and vaseline, as soon as integral to the tattoo course of; the stew’s age and exact contents are unsure.
“I don’t know what’s in there. I’m not reaching in to seek out out,” Barba stated.
“Distinctive odor, additionally,” stated Lerew, leaning to smell.
What shapes a compulsive collector?
Lerew, who lives along with his spouse in Lincoln Heights, grew up in rural South Dakota. His household made common journeys to roadside points of interest such because the fake cowboy city at Buffalo Ridge and the Corn Palace in Mitchell, the place one thing about “the curious, the distinctive and the obscure” acquired underneath Lerew’s pores and skin.
After graduating from Hampshire Faculty in Massachusetts, he got here west in 2009 and went to grad college at CalArts, specializing in experimental music composition. However his consideration strayed, a trait that grew to become knowledgeable asset when the Library Basis of Los Angeles employed Lerew as program supervisor in 2015.
Todd Lerew, writer of the guide “Additionally on View,” about small and stunning museum in Larger Los Angeles, exhibits the map filled with museum places that he retains on his telephone.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
In his off hours, he’d take a look at different libraries and museums — usually six or seven in a day, all logged on a spreadsheet. To seek out all of them, he’d examine Boris Stanic’s guidebook, “Museum Companion to Los Angeles,” in addition to scanning the net and speaking to buddies and strangers.
In 2016, after months of listening to from Lerew about his weekend explorations of obscure collections and archives round Southern California, the muse’s president, Ken Brecher, assigned Lerew to curate an exhibition on native collectors that grew to become “21 Collections: Each Object Has a Story.”
“I’ve all the time collected experiences of 1 type or one other,” Lerew stated. “I used to be simply exploring as a result of I had a non-public curiosity and obsession find new and distinctive locations and folks. It form of acquired formalized when i began engaged on that exhibition.”
What makes a museum?
Lerew stated he’s wanting to see nearly anywhere that calls itself a museum, whether or not or not it has nonprofit standing or educational credentials or a everlasting house. He’s additionally drawn to areas which may not name themselves museums however usually behave like them, together with park customer facilities or faculty artwork galleries.
In relation to selfie-driven workouts just like the nationwide Museum of Ice Cream chain (which had an L.A. pop-up location in 2017), he’s not so .
And in each museum, he considers the supply rigorously. At most historic museums within the U.S., he stated, “It’s the white folks’s historical past of that space,” omitting a lot and maybe whitewashing a lot else.
“You simply need to remember, whenever you’re going to those locations, of who’s telling the story,” he stated. “There are extra tales on the market, all the time.”
By the point his “Collections” present went up within the Central Library in 2018, Lerew had scouted greater than 600 places, enlisting collections that included paper airplanes (from the Getty), typewriters (from Tom Hanks), sweet wrappers and birds’ nests. From that venture got here a self-published guide, an Instagram marketing campaign (@museumaday) and now the brand new quantity, espresso table-ready.
By hand, she re-creates key moments in Black historical past
A “Black Lives Matter” diorama created by Karen Collins.
(Ryan Schude)
“Oh, massive footage!” Karen Collins stated when Lerew arrived at her house in Compton and handed her the guide. “I don’t know why, however I used to be picturing one thing small.”
Small, in any case, is Collins’ specialty. Round her front room, miniature dioramas of essential moments in Black American historical past took up a lot of the horizontal house. A “Black Lives Matter” triptych, made for the Central Library’s “21 Collections” exhibition, sat above the fireside.
Collins, 73, a retired preschool instructor, creates the dioramas, making and arranging miniatures inside shadow containers made by her husband, Eddie Lewis. She began about 30 years in the past, after her son was despatched to jail as a Twelfth-grader and she or he felt “able to die.”
She pushed grief again by resolving to painting key figures and moments in Black historical past, to encourage and educate grade-school kids, “and allow them to know, you will get over something. … The artwork saved my life.”
Karen Collins and her African American Miniature Museum, a group of Black historical past dioramas she made and retains in her Compton house, are featured in “Additionally on View,” Todd Lerew’s guide about small and stunning museums in Larger Los Angeles.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
There have been dozens of dioramas since then, depicting scenes from the Center Passage to Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Colin Powell, the Obama inauguration, Compton Cowboys and Kendrick Lamar.
For years, Collins and her husband introduced shadow containers — their cellular museum — to varsities and neighborhood occasions. Lerew noticed her work on show in Leimert Park.
Lerew: “What number of of those have you ever made over time?”
Collins: “Quite a bit. As a result of I give them away.”
Past Lerew’s Central Library exhibition and guide, Collins has been commissioned by the Autry Museum (the place a number of dioramas are a part of the everlasting exhibition “Imagined Wests”), profiled by nationwide media retailers and chosen to offer a Google doodle for the sixtieth anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C., civil rights sit-ins. Her son, nonetheless incarcerated, “is happy with me,” she stated.
Now she’s engaged on a coloring guide and hoping to seek out “a steady place for this museum to be … for our kids to see their value,” she informed Lerew.
“It’s a extremely difficult factor,” Lerew stated later, “when it’s one individual’s ardour venture. … I can’t say what would possibly occur for Karen’s assortment. I’ve hopes. Time will inform.”
Is Lerew completed with little museums now? Completely not.
Past these within the guide, he’s put one other 700-plus massive and small Southern California museums onto an everymuseum.la web site, now dwell.
Then there’s the opposite listing on his telephone, the place he has keyed in all of the unseen museums he needs to go to. Worldwide. There are 3,231 of them.
